Trop fatiguée d'inventer un titre intéressant

Highlights of the week: 

• Virtual Xenia dinner on Sunday night (in the wee hours of Monday morning for me), despite being able to actually hear very little and despite having to get up for an early class on Monday...which was cancelled, but I didn't know that until I'd gotten there. I miss Midd professors who email you when they aren't going to show up.
  
• Mysteriously nonexistent bus on Tuesday led me to try walking home from Hôpital de la Milétrie - I arrived about an hour later, by probably the most circuitous route possible. Fortunately, it was a pleasant day for walking.
• Three hours of outlining with my partner for an oral presentation on Balzac and mimesis. French students are every writing teacher's dream: they start by brainstorming, progress to outlines, leave the introduction and conclusion for last, consider revision a mandatory process...it would have been my own personal nightmare in English, but in French the organized method cuts down on comprehension problems. And I'm sure we're going to come out of it with a very good presentation.
• Les Bacchantes for Elizabeth's 21st birthday (a little anticlimactic, seeing as how she could have bought a drink just as easily the day before) and folk dancing, which was excellent. I learned how to dance the mazurka, at least well enough to follow my partner. It's Polish and lovely and counted in 9 beats, and the music is generally melancholy and romantic. I'm a fan.
• Waking up this morning for an 8 a.m. class after a mere 4 hours of sleep, and with a sore throat to boot. I more or less slept through said class, and afterwards braved a French pharmacy to get cough drops. Procuring anything remotely medicinal (up to and including contact solution) requires interacting with a pharmacist - no running into the grocery store to grab a bottle of Advil. On the one hand, they know quite a bit; on the other hand, I don't like being stared at while I decide what I want. Bah.
• Chest x-ray today to confirm that no, in fact, I don't have tuberculosis and it really is okay for me to stay in France for a year. I fail to comprehend the reasoning behind the procedure, since surely a short-stay visa still gives you sufficient time to infect people with TB. Who knows. It was also an object lesson in the casual French attitude towards nudity - in the U.S. they tend to give you a gown if you have to halfway disrobe for an x-ray. Oh, Europeans. On the other hand, I didn't have to wait at all - in fact, there was almost nobody in the hospital. It was faintly creepy. I walked home afterwards by a much more direct route, though it's still a solid 40 minutes. But a sunny 40 minutes, so no complaints.

Now just tomorrow to get through. Plans for the weekend: sleep. Lots of it.

Vive la Révolution

I've been to Bible study a few times now, so I decided it was time to buy an actual Bible. In naive American fashion, I thought this could be accomplished at a bookstore, so I went to Gibert Joseph - a chain, maybe not quite as large as B&N or Hastings, but same principle. First I looked around the religion section - nothing. Then I asked the saleswoman, who looked surprised by my request but directed me to the Livres de poche section (practically everything comes in a Livre de poche - literally, pocket book - edition) - nothing there either. So I asked another saleswoman, who looked similarly surprised and flagged down a coworker, who informed me with a shrug that they were out of Bibles. I waited momentarily for something like "...and we'll be getting more tomorrow." No such luck.

I recounted this experience to my host family over dinner, and was laughed over indulgently. Apparently no self-respecting French bookstore sells Bibles. I have to go to the librairie biblique for that, and, as Christelle said, I will never find it on my own (hopefully there was an implicit "I'll take you sometime" in there). The Revolution did its work well and thoroughly - most French people are aggressively secular, like my history professor, who finds it necessary to preface every remark vaguely pertaining to religious belief with "in the Christian imagination..." On the other hand, whenever I'm in churches (which is fairly often - I love them) I see a good number of lit candles and one or two people saying their rosary or praying to a saint - and this at random times on weekday afternoons. It's like the country has a split personality. Honestly, I think in all their efforts to separate religion from the state they've just made religion an even more constant specter - in the U.S. you can walk into any Wal-Mart and buy a Bible off the tiny book aisle and nobody thinks twice about it. Here I feel like any religious reference is followed by an awkward half-second pause. Ah well, hurrah for cultural differences. 

The Bises Problem

So when I idly posed the following math problem in my last post, I wasn't really thinking about it, but it's actually a little bit interesting. 

The Question: If a party of nine people is breaking up, in which there are five girls, four guys, and no relations, how many kisses will be exchanged?

The Assumptions: Any pairing involving a girl (that is, girl-girl or girl-guy) will result in two kisses (one on each cheek). Since none of the guys are related, any pairing of two guys will result in no kisses.

To warm up, let's consider the Handshake Problem: If a roomful of n people all shake hands with one another, how many handshakes will be exchanged? For simplicity's sake, let's say n in this case is 10. That means each person in the room shakes hands with 9 other people, so you might be tempted to multiply 10 by 9 and arrive at 90 handshakes. Actually, though, you've double-counted each handshake, since A shakes hands with B and B shakes hands with A, but that's only one handshake total. So you divide by 2 and arrive at 45 handshakes. Or, more generally, in a room with n people, you will have [n*(n - 1)]/2 hanshakes.

My problem is a little more complicated, since the guys don't faire les bises among themselves and instead of one handshake, we have 2 bises. If you look at the picture (sorry, it's not the most beautiful graph ever, since I drew it by hand and photographed it with my webcam, but it will have to do), where G = girl, B = boy, and each line = 2 bises, all the girls are connected to everyone else but the boys are only connected to the girls. For the moment, let's pretend kisses are like handshakes, i.e. one between two people. All you have to do is calculate the number of kisses for a normal group of 9 and then subtract the number that aren't being exchanged by the group of 4 boys, in other words:

(9*8)/2 - (4*3)/2 = 36 - 6 = 30

Now, remembering that each exchange of bises actually involves 2 kisses, we multiply by 2 to arrive at 60 total kisses in the above scenario. In other words, Elizabeth wins!

(Is it glaringly apparent how much I miss math?)

Les Expressifs

Starting yesterday, there's been some sort of street fair going on on downtown Poitiers called Les Expressifs. The idea seems to be to get together a bunch of street performers, plus some musical groups. I heard very loud rock music coming from the tent in the square in front of the Hôtel de Ville this afternoon, and this morning I watched a guy engage in pseudo-juggling (à la Renfest, rolling them down his arms and around his body and such). I'm pretty sure the story he was telling to go with it was some sort of political allegory, but a) I couldn't hear very well and b) I don't know enough about politics to get it even if I'd understood. There were a lot of crunchy-granola types (or whatever they're called in France) in attendance; in fact, I have a feeling this whole festival would be very at home in Vermont.

The actual point of going into town today was to get my receipt for my application for a titre de séjour (residency permit), which took all of five minutes but required an hour of waiting in line at the Préfecture. Everything administrated by the government, from drivers' licenses to citizenship applications, goes through the Préfecture - not very efficient, in my opinion. Waiting at the DPS is bad, but at least you're only waiting behind other people wanting their drivers' licenses. So that was a pleasant way to pass an hour's worth of my afternoon. On the other hand, I bought a nice scarf in order to blend in more readily with the French population (staying warm being a secondary motive).

I went to Bible study again last night, which was great fun (much more lively discussion/analysis of the text this time around), involved another dinner of crepes (never a bad thing), and was like a miniature cultural education in and of itself. I think I've finally properly decoded the ritual of les bises (cheek-kissing). If there's a female involved, two kisses are pretty much automatic (but occasionally just one; for example, you've boarded a bus and see four or five of your friends and are trying to greet them all while not falling down or knocking anyone over). When two guys greet each other, if they're related, they'll probably kiss on one cheek (more on greeting people you're related to later); if they're not related, they'll shake hands, varying from a warm clasp to a manly grasp depending on the age of the parties involved (manliness being inversely proportional to age, amusingly enough). That being established, the question is obviously when this ritual is necessary. It doesn't appear to be normal to thus greet people you live with (hence the two-related-men scenario only occurs if, say, Bruno's older son who lives in an apartment comes over to visit), unless you haven't seen them in a few days and/or they're leaving for a prolonged period. On the other hand, anyone you have even a passing acquaintance with is fair game, which means you'll probably end up faire-ing les bises with half the students in any given class every time it meets. People you don't know at all are equally fair game, sometimes as a precursor to an actual introduction, sometimes just to be friendly (several girls in my history class greeted my like this three weeks in a row before I actually figured out their names). If it's obvious you're foreign (like me), there's more likely to be hesitation on the part of the other party, though usually they can't overcome the impulse. Other foreigners are the trickiest, especially if you have no idea what part of Europe they're from: to faire or not to faire, is always the question. And the most tiresome manifestation of the habit is when leaving a gathering, whereupon you are morally obligated to kiss everybody in the room, which takes absolutely forever if everyone is leaving at once.

I leave you with a math problem: if a party of nine people is breaking up, in which there are five girls, four guys, and no relations, how many kisses will be exchanged?

Those who cannot write, translate.

Due to the interesting scheduling habits of the university, all four of my translation classes meet on Monday and Tuesday, which is fine and all except for the part where I have three translations due at the beginning of every week. Ah well. Today we looked at the extract of Toni Morisson's Song of Solomon we had to do over the weekend, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I'd made a lot of the same choices as the native French speakers in the class. (Today's the day to get a bit of a morale boost before M. Fryd's class tomorrow, in which I will undoubtedly discover that I can't speak or write French.) I spent most of the class period wishing that everyone but the ten or so of us who actually cared would just go away (I haven't seen a teacher have that much trouble keeping a class quiet since the year I read to the kindergarten class every week), but the professor had some interesting insights (including one spot where she'd actually understood the English better than several of us anglophones...that was slightly embarrassing). After class, I checked out a copy of Le chant de Salomon from the university library, and discovered that the translator had rendered most things the same way we had in class; in some cases I even think we did a better job. So, yay for us.

In between classes, I went into town with Elizabeth to attempt to pick up the books we'd ordered for our literature class. First the bookstore was closed over lunch (only on Mondays - I'd understand if it were everyday, but what about Monday particularly necessitates a long lunch break?), and when we returned, the saleswoman told us one of the books was indefinitely unobtainable; no, she didn't really know anything, would we please hurry up and go away. So that was frustrating. In the interim I tried to procure makeup, having had a clumsy moment with my powder that ended with it everywhere except in its container, but a) the color Matte Ivory doesn't exist in France and b) when the saleswoman found another color that would work for me, it was out of stock. Today hasn't been my day for shopping.

My second translation class (French to English) was predictably frustrating, since the professor and I do not speak the same version of the English language. It's doubly frustrating because she will commend all sorts of approximate, even verging on ridiculous, translations from the French students, but she has no problem shooting down reasonable suggestions from the anglophones in the class if they don't match her specific idea. "Approximate" is probably the best way to describe her style of translation. Given that, it's fortunate she doesn't have us tackling canonical French literature the way my other professor is going after serious English/American stuff (Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, Garrison Keillor...oh wait). Instead, we've been translating excerpts of murder mysteries and newspaper articles, though I disagree strongly with some of her pronouncements about journalistic style. Can you tell I'm really a fan of this professor? I'd like to poll the audience: is "a pressure cooker ready to explode at any moment" a legitimate metaphor for a tense situation (think riots, racial conflict, etc.)?

I don't mean to give you the wrong impression; despite wanting to engage this professor in argument after every sentence, I think I'm learning a lot from the class, probably exactly because I disagree with her so much. I'm also learning how to keep my mouth shut and carry out these arguments in my head. I'm coming to the conclusion that translation is something I really could enjoy as a career.